In this month’s The Atlantic, journalist Daniel Bergner chronicles competing views of stop-and-frisk policies. The New York Police Department’s intensive use of stop-and-frisk against black and Latino residents received intense scrutiny, eventually resulting in a federal district court's finding that the department has been hiding under this constitutionally permissible practice to engage in constitutionally impermissible racial profiling. Bergner discusses New York, but spends most of his reporting in Newark, New Jersey tagging along with local officers on patrol. There he encounters an [...]
Unflattering picture of ICE’s use of detainers
A report released this week by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University casts serious doubt on ICE's claim that it uses detainers to target noncitizens who pose a danger to the public. TRAC, Few ICE Detainers Target Serious Criminals (September 17, 2013). According to ICE data that TRAC obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, just under half (47.7% or 165,769) of detainers were issued against people with no criminal conviction whatsoever. Between October 1, 2011 and January 31, 2013, ICE issued 347,691 detainers. Of the individuals against whom a detainer [...]
Tx Ct Crim App: Right to counsel properly waived despite not being told about deportation possibility
The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas, the state’s highest criminal court, held that a person who waived his right to an attorney in a misdemeanor drug possession prosecution did not do so impermissibly despite not having been told that he might be deportable upon conviction. State v. Guerrero, No. PD-1258-12, slip op. (Tex. Crim. App. June 5, 2013) (Cochran, Keller, Price, Womack, Johnson, Keasler, Hervey, and Alcala, JJ.). Judge Cochran wrote the court’s opinion. This case presents like the picture of interior immigration enforcement in the age of crImmigration law. The defendant entered [...]
Regulating Migrants in Franklin County, Ohio–Part 2
Lauren Hines Within Franklin County, Ohio, the most effective method for finding and removing criminal migrants is regulating the movement of migrants across space. Civil and criminal charges that often lead to a migrant’s arrest are subjective. The high removal rates of migrants without criminal records and migrants facing low-level misdemeanor and civil charges in Franklin County make sense within an enforcement framework that willfully obfuscates the line between criminal and civil codes, and criminalizes migrant interactions with law enforcement for the sake of creating removable [...]
Scholars Sidebar: Are immigration detainers illegal?
DHS closed the year with a series of important announcements: its 409,000 removals, it plans to shut down its § 287(g) program, and it distributed criteria for ICE field officers to use to determine when to issue an immigration detainer. To Christopher N. Lasch, an assistant professor at the University of Denver who co-directs the law school’s criminal defense clinic, all of these plus last spring’s blockbuster decision in Arizona v. United States support a claim that the federal government lacks the authority to issue immigration detainers as it has been doing with great frequency in recent [...]
U.S. Immigration Policing in the Season of Presidential Elections
The folks over at the Migrants’ Rights Network, a great advocacy group based in London, asked me to share my thoughts on how the presidential election affects immigration policing. Here’s a slightly revised version of the essay originally published on MRN’s Migration Pulse blog: The presidential election in the United States is two weeks away and both major party candidates, as well as third party candidates, know that high Latino turnout in a few key states has the potential to swing the election. Not coincidentally given many Latinos’ strong immigration experience personally or through [...]
Scholars Sidebar: 287(g) counties lose immigrant farm labor & profitability
A recently released economic analysis suggests that counties that enact 287(g) programs lose immigrant agricultural workers and suffer decreased farm profitability, but state level 287(g) agreements don’t have the same impact. Genti Kostandini, Elton Mykerezi, and Cesar Escalante, The Impact of Immigration Enforcement on the Farming Sector (2012). The authors, economists at the University of Georgia and University of Minnesota, examined data from the American Community Survey and Census of Agriculture for states and counties, respectively, that entered into local immigration policing [...]
Scholars Sidebar: Immigrant Outsider, Alien Invader: Immigration Policing Today
I recently published an introduction to a group of essays about the reappearance of old fears about immigrants in today’s immigration policymaking. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Immigrant Outsider, Alien Invader: Immigration Policing Today, 48 California Western Law Review 231 (2012). Despite the unprecedented scope of today’s policing apparatus, I wrote (in the abstract), there is reason for hope: Immigration policing has become a high-tech, multi-pronged affair financed annually by billions of dollars of personnel and the tools of their trade: prisons, weapons, massive computer [...]